RBCommons

Today’s release of RBTools fixes some of the most common issues experienced in the recent 1.0 release:

Improved Windows compatibility

This release fixes some regressions on Windows, namely a crash when prompting for a password for Review Board.

If you’re continuing to hit problems on Windows, please let us know in our community support tracker so we can collect additional information on your setup.

Fixes for Empty Diff errors on Git

While RBTools 1.0 greatly improved how diffs were generated for Git repositories under many scenarios, it broke one important workflow.

Posting a branch for review after pushing that branch upstream no longer results in errors about empty diffs when a tracking branch is configured. Instead, the tracking branch is once again respected, allowing your topic branch to be posted for review in full.

RBTools has been an important part of the life of Review Board users for many years. While it started off as a single tool for posting review requests, its feature set has evolved with time, turning into an extensible set of tools and APIs for talking to Review Board.

Today, we’re finally pulling RBTools out of the 0.x era with the release of RBTools 1.0.

Compatible with Python 3

Both the RBTools commands and the Python API now support Python 2.7 and 3.5+.

(Please let us know if you hit any issues on Python 3, as this is still pretty new.)

Better Repository Detection and Git Support

RBTools now does a better job determining which repository it’s working with, in case there’s confusion. For example, a Mercurial repository nested in a Git-managed home directory will no longer cause problems.

Git repositories in particular are now easier to work with. When generating a diff, RBTools now looks for the nearest upstream parent commit or branch, instead of requiring that users or repositories configure a specific tracking branch.

Publish Automated Reviews

Writing your own automated review solutions for Review Board 3.0 or RBCommons just became easier through the new rbt status-update command. Your scripts can use it to file a pending status update on a review request (showing that checks are being performed) and then update it to say that all is well or to report issues that need to be fixed.

This is useful for in-house continuous integration setups where you’re analyzing code for errors, style issues, documentation, or any other requirements you might have.

Easily Land Complex Dependent Changes

This works with -r to take the ID of the review request you want to land. It will figure out which review requests must land before it and in which order. For example, if review request 3 depends on 2, which depends on 1, you can run:

$ rbt land --recursive -r 3

Instead of:

$ rbt land -r 1
$ rbt land -r 2
$ rbt land -r 3

This is a precursor to the new DVCS support coming soon in Review Board 4.0.

And That’s Not All

rbt setup-completion was added to enable auto-completion of RBTools commands and arguments in Bash and ZSH shells.

If you’ve been on the Internet at all in the past few weeks, you’ve likely been bombarded by e-mails from every service you’ve ever used telling you that they’ve updated their privacy policy.

Yes, we’ve updated ours too, but we want to talk to you about how we manage your data, the greater picture of privacy on the Internet, the European Union’s new GDPR legislation, and why this all matters to you, no matter where you are in the world.

GDPR: A new standard for privacy

On May 25th, the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) goes into effect in the EU. It gives users there an unprecedented level of control and insight into their personal information. Amongst other things:

People must be able to change, delete, or request copies of their personally identifiable information

Companies need a valid legal basis for the usage of that information (which may require getting consent for that use)

Handing that data off to third-parties also requires a legal basis, and must be documented in a privacy policy

That privacy policy must be able to be read and understood without a law degree

You must admit, that’s pretty nice. Though companies are not required to give these rights to non-EU residents, many (including us) are treating this as a new global standard.

Some parts of the GDPR are a bit vague and not all companies see eye-to-eye on the level of control you should have. We’re hoping our approach goes above and beyond.

Our new privacy guarantees

We’ve always collected as little data as needed. We don’t need much, except to provide services to you, to aid in team communication, and to make use of third-party services we trust who help us run our business and provide support to you.

Still, under the GDPR, there was more for us to do. So here’s what we’re promising:

We’ll continue to only collect what we strictly need, and to document it clearly in our Privacy Policy.

We’ll continue to give you control of your data, and handle deletion and alteration requests, as we always have.

We’ve updated our services to request your consent (and give you full control over it at any time) for any optional usage of your personal information, and any usage we strictly require to run our services effectively will be clearly documented.

We’ve never sold your information and never will.

We’re extending the rights granted by the GDPR to all users of our products, everywhere.

To help, we’ve built a whole new privacy-focused framework in Djblets to help with privacy guarantees and consent requests. All our software will be using this and we’ll be encouraging Review Board extension authors to use it. We’ll talk about this in more detail in an upcoming post.

What to expect by May 25th

We’ll be activating the enhanced privacy support on RBCommons, reviewboard.org, reviews.reviewboard.org, and Splat in time for the 25th. If you’re a user on these, the next time you connect you’ll be asked to accept the Privacy Policy and to allow or block usage of your information for some services.

We’ll also be releasing Review Board 3.0.7 and Djblets 1.0.6, which are privacy-enhanced, optionally allowing for Terms of Service and Privacy Policy URLs and GDPR-compliant consent functionality. Many servers may not need this, but it’ll be available for those that do.

If you want to change, delete, or request any of your personal information from our servers, or want more information on all this, reach out to us at any time and we’ll help. You don’t need to wait for May 25th.

Over the weekend, we deployed a new major version of RBCommons, offering many new features and laying the groundwork for additional ones we’ll be bringing you soon.

New code review capabilities, including revokable Ship-Its, general comments not tied to code or file attachments, and the ability to require verification before issues are resolved.

Discussions are now easier to follow. New updates, reviews, and replies are highlighted in blue, helping them stand out. Desktop notifications let your browser notify you when there’s new updates to the page. Images can be dropped into text fields to provide some visuals with your comment. Emoji shortcodes can be used.

Feature improvements are everywhere. Custom avatar images can be set on your account. There are handy buttons for quickly navigating between file attachments. High-DPI image attachments are scale to fit on your screen. Review requests can be re-assigned to other team members.

RBCommons is faster. Along with optimizations in the new version, we’ve also begun moving parts of our architecture onto new servers, with more coming this week. You should start seeing those benefits soon.

Coming soon, we’ll be bringing integrations with Slack and Mattermost chat, continuous integration with Travis CI and CircleCI, support for searching review requests, and new billing improvements (separate billing contact and administrative roles, and CC’ing invoices to an address of your choosing). We’re still testing these internally, and plan to start rolling these out in stages over the next couple months.

We hope you like the new RBCommons! As always, if you have any questions or hit any problems, we’re only a chat message away 🙂

It was a pretty great release, fulfilling a lot of feature requests we’ve had for a while an providing the foundation for some new work we’re doing. Unfortunately, there was a last-minute error that, in production, broke part of the form for repository configuration.

Really embarrassing.

Now, we’ve found most people don’t upgrade the same day that a release goes out (downtime must be scheduled, people are busy, etc.) so we mostly started hearing about it two days later. As soon as we realized the mistake, we quickly got a new release out, Review Board 3.0.5, and put some changes in place to help prevent this sort of last-minute problem from happening again.

The good news is that, in the meantime, we went through and fixed a bunch of bugs that didn’t make the 3.0.4 release, but were ready for 3.0.5. So really, we’re just hoping we can all pretend 3.0.4 was just a pre-release for 3.0.5 now 🙂

Review Board 3.0.6 is currently scheduled for April 10th. I’m expecting it to go smoothly.

RB-Gateway Difficulties and Delays

Let me back up. RB-Gateway is written in Go, unlike most of our projects which are Python-based. Go was chosen partly due to concurrency benefits for handling and serving up requests, and partly for its ease of cross-compilation and distribution (just drop it into a directory and run it on any supported platform).

It’s the cross-compilation that posed a problem. We use git2go, a Go wrapper around libgit2, a C library for talking to Git repositories. We don’t need a lot from it, but it made sense to “go” with that (sorry).

Problem is, including a C library makes cross-compilation much harder, and there’s threads full of discussions on issues with compiling and utilizing git2go in production, depending on how it’s compiled and used. So we’re planning to remove git2go usage.

Instead, we’re evaluating other Git libraries. We probably won’t roll our own, but as we don’t really need much from a Go library, we’ll “go” that route if we need to (sorry).

When that’s done, we should be ready to release.

Prep for RBCommons 3.0

This Friday, we’re beginning an upgrade of RBCommons, bringing many of the features of Review Board 3.0 to the service. We’ve spent much of this week getting this ready — rebuilding servers, testing database migrations, running through checklists of manual feature tests, etc.

There’s going to be a lot to love in this release, but those following Review Board development will surely notice that some features (such as Slack, Asana, etc. integrations) will not be there on launch. We have just a bit more work to do before those are ready. We want those as much as anybody, so they’re high up on the priority list.

The blocker right now is that the administration pages for some of these features are built to plug into the Django administration page, not the custom RBCommons team administration page. So there’s still some work to do before that’s complete. Soon, though!

The upgrade should be smooth, and we should be back up in only a few hours, but just in case, we’re leaving the maintenance window open through Sunday. We aimed for a holiday weekend (well, holiday for a lot of people, anyway) to reduce the impact on users.

It’s been too long since we last ran the ChangeLog series, and felt it was the right time to start it back up again. ChangeLog is a look into the latest behind-the-scenes work going into Review Board, RBCommons, and other Beanbag projects. While intended to be a weekly series, we’d like to start off with some of the bigger tasks and feature development from the past month.

Moving to Django 1.11 and Python 3

Today, all current versions of Review Board depend on Django 1.6, an old release that’s no longer supported by the Django project but is by us, and doesn’t support modern Python 3 releases.

We’ve been stuck on 1.6 because 1.7 introduced (and later mandated) a new way of handling database migrations, which is incompatible with the method we’ve always used. Reconciling the differences has been a challenge.

In the past month, we’ve made significant progress toward both the Django and Python updates:

Djblets 2.0 (our development release) is now compatible with Django 1.6 through 1.11 and Python 2.7, 3.4, 3.5, and 3.6.

Django Evolution (used for database migrations) now works with Django 1.6 through 1.11 and Python 2.7, 3.4, 3.5, and 3.6. Work’s being done to let it co-exist with Django migrations now.

Review Board has started receiving patches for Django 1.11 and Python 3.5+ now. This is still in development, and likely won’t make the Review Board 4.0 release, but will be there for 5.0.

RBTools 1.0 (shipping in a few months) now has full Python 3 support.

New Release Schedules

We’ve began moving to a train model for releases, and have all of our main and upcoming products now on the calendar.

We’re planning to release a new major Review Board release every ~6 months, meaning smaller but more frequent releases. We’re still experimenting with the schedule and timeframe for these releases.

RB-Gateway

We’ve releasing RB-Gateway 1.0 this month. This is a microservice designed to sit in front of a Git or Mercurial repository, providing an API and set of integrations that can be used by Review Board or any other tool or service for more deeply working with your repository.

RB-Gateway doesn’t change your workflow, and can be dropped in with minimal effort. It completely replaces the cgit/gitweb workaround for standalone Git repositories, and means you don’t need to set up something more complicated like GitLab just to work with Review Board.

You’ll see more information on RB-Gateway’s capabilities when we release later this month, and we’ll cover improvements being made to it here.

Wrapping Up…

Those are really just the major highlights, to get everyone up to speed. It doesn’t include the new features we’ve recently built, like being able to filter files in the diff viewer based on filename patterns, a new command for creating Review Board extension source trees, the work done on kgb, or the crazy investigation into deadlocks that’s delayed Review Board 3.0.4.

Going forward, these will be smaller, covering only what’s been done over the past week. If you like these posts, and want to see this continue, please let us know! You can find us on reddit or on the community support list.

For years, we’ve been maintaining three separate blogs for our products: the RBCommons Blog, Review Board News, and the Beanbag Blog. It made sense at the time to keep these separate, but these days it’s usually more confusing than it needs to be, with release announcements and helpful guides scattered across the blogs.

We began the process of consolidating these last night, and started with merging the RBCommons Blog into the Beanbag Blog. Unfortunately, due to a glitch with our mailing list provider, an e-mail went out today covering last February’s CloudFlare-related security issue. If you received this, we’re very sorry — that shouldn’t have happened, and you don’t need to worry about some new problem affecting RBCommons.

We’ll be posting more articles here going forward, along with RBCommons updates and RBTools release announcements. We recently started a series of articles on new Review Board features that will soon make its way to RBCommons as part of a major update we’re gearing up for.

macOS and Browser Windows

macOS users who have upgraded to recent releases of Sierra lost the ability to run rbt post --open (to open the posted review request in a browser window) due to a Python/AppleScript bug. This is Python bug #30392, for those who are interested.

We’ve worked around this. Your default browser will work once again. Thanks to those who pointed this out!

There’s also a whole new macOS installer coming that should actually work on all setups. We’ll have this on the Downloads page once it gets a little more testing.

Git and Git-SVN

Git-SVN users should no longer encounter crashes when trying to post changes for review. That was pretty disruptive.

Git repositories with submodules containing pending changes no longer cause warnings about dirty repositories when posting changes. They’re not included anyway, and just added to the confusion.

Crazy Subversion Diffs

If you had a line of code being deleted that happened to look like a diff header (say, --- XX (YY)), it could cause some code we have for fixing up diffs to get very confused. That, unfortunately, could lead to lines being excluded from the diff, breaking when you try viewing it in the diff viewer.

We’ve rewritten this code to be very careful about these lines. It won’t get confused again.

Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio 2017

Team Foundation Server users who have upgraded to Visual Studio 2017 can once again post changes. TFS has had a nasty habit of changing their file formats, APIs, and command line options, but after much tearing out of the hair, we’ve restored compatibility.

All versions from Visual Studio 2011 onward should work just fine, so no need to upgrade to 2017 just to use this release.

We’ve also fixed a regression when using the Team Explorer Everywhere adapter.

ClearCase and Cross-Platform VOB Lookups

ClearCase users can now name their repositories in Review Board based on a component of a VOB path, instead of naming it based on the entire VOB path. This helps with the differences in how ClearCase represents VOB paths on different platforms. For instance, a VOB path of /vobs/MyVOB or C:\vobs\MyVOB will now match a repository name of MyVOB.

There are also some performance improvements for looking up VOBs.

And Other Such Things

There are improvements to the Python API, such as not prematurely exiting the process, plus compatibility fixes for Review Board 3.0. We’ve also added a new config option to disable certain warnings in RBTools, which would be especially useful for repository hook scripts.

There was a major security breach announced this week by Cloudflare, a popular service used by millions of sites. This security breach affected customers around the world, causing passwords, API tokens, private conversations, and more to be leaked into search engines and people’s browser sessions.

You probably have a lot of passwords you’ll need to change this week, but don’t worry, RBCommons does not use Cloudflare, nor do the services RBCommons depends on. Your information is safe!

We’ve just put out an all-new release of RBTools. Version 0.7.7 features compatibility fixes for various types of repositories, better support for TFS, and some new features to help with common usage and automation.

You can see the release notes for the full list of changes. We’ll go over the highlights here.

Compatibility/bug fixes

In this release, we’ve aimed to fix a handful of compatibility problems that have been reported to us. Thanks to all the contributors who sent patches!

RBTools is once again compatible with Mercurial 2.x. This regressed in 0.7.6.

Some error displays are fixed when using the version of Python shipped with macOS 10.11.

Repository lookups utilizing mirror paths or Subversion UUIDs now work once again. These regressed in 0.7.6.

rbt post for Git now supports --exclude-patterns when using git-svn or git-p4.

rbt land no longer crashes if it can’t determine the approval state on a review request.

Improved Team Foundation Server support

The old TFS support was a bit slow, due to the way we had to interact with the Team Foundation Server command line tools. It also presented compatibility problems, as different versions of Visual Studio shipped different, incompatible versions of these tools.

We’ve now introduced new support that doesn’t depend on their tools and is optimized for our use cases. This means better compatibility everywhere, faster posting, and new features.

To start with, we’re adding the ability to post shelved changesets! You can do this by simply running:

rbt post <shelveset-name>

To begin using RBTools 0.7.7 with TFS, you will need to install our new TFS adapter by typing:

rbt install tfs

New features

We’ve added the ability to specify a destination tracking branch for rbt land. To choose something other than the default (say, origin/master on Git), you can now specify:

rbt land --tracking-branch <branch-name>

If you find yourself needing to pass --svn-prompt-password all the time for your Subversion setup, you can set SVN_PROMPT_PASSWORD in your project’s or user’s .reviewboardrc instead. Just set this and you’ll never have to type it again:

SVN_PROMPT_PASSWORD = True

What’s coming next

We’re working toward a RBTools 1.0 release, which will feature enhanced support for Mercurial, new automation commands for use in the upcoming Review Board 3.0, easier setup and installation, and better display of progress when posting changes.

We’re also hard at work on a rewrite of our documentation, with the aim of providing more practical, detailed setup and usage guides for RBTools. These will begin to land over the next month.